1. Field of the Description
The present description relates, in general, to amusement park rides and other entertainment rides such as round iron rides, and, more particularly, to amusement or theme park rides configured to provide passengers with an additional degree of freedom of movement and/or increased interactivity and control as compared with conventional round rides where speed of rotation and height of a passenger compartment are typically the varying ride characteristics.
2. Relevant Background
Amusement and theme parks are popular worldwide with hundreds of millions of people visiting the parks each year. Park operators continuously seek new designs for rides that attract and continue to entertain guests. Many parks include round iron rides that include vehicles or gondolas mounted on support arms extending outward from a centrally located drive or rotation assembly. The guests sit in the vehicles and are rotated in a circle about the drive assembly, which spins about its central axis. In some of these rides, the guests may operate an interactive device, such as a joystick in the vehicle, to make the support arm and their attached vehicle lift upward and, later, drop back downward. In other words, the angle of the support arm relative to the ground may be changed by the guest while the vehicle spins about a central rotation axis at a fixed radius (i.e., the length of the support arm) and at a constant speed.
While these rides are often very popular with younger children, these rides are typically not considered a thrill ride for the older guests as the rides often rotate at less than 10 revolutions per minute (RPM). When designing new rides, park operators have a great amount of freedom to develop thrill rides with very different configurations such as roller coasters and the like that allow the guests to travel at high speeds and experience high accelerations as their vehicles travel around corners and dips. However, park operators face a different challenge when they attempt to refurbish or modify an existing round iron ride to create a ride that will attract older guests but that yet can be provided in the same space constraints or have the same footprint, i.e., a ride provided within the same circular area used by the original round iron ride. Even more attractive to the park operator would be a ride configuration that made use of at least some of the original ride components such as the circular drive assembly as this significantly reduces start up costs and allows continued use of a proven drive system. Alternatively, it is desirable to create a new round ride that makes use of a portion of the round ride (such as the rotating center structure and arm pivot assembly) so that these aspects do not have to be newly designed, engineered, and tested and such that new rides with small foot print, low cost/risk, and medium capacity can be provided to guests.
Hence, there remains a need for a round ride designed to provide a more exciting, thrilling, and engaging experience. In some cases, the round ride would also provide enhanced interactivity for the vehicle passengers. However, the relatively low rotation rate of the drive assembly and the typically fixed seating orientation of the guest has been a significant barrier to the amount of thrill or excitement that could be provided in the past with a ride based on a round iron ride design, and any new design should attempt to provide a varying experience that attracts repeat use by guests visiting an amusement park without requiring radical and/or expensive changes to the base configuration.